This application is related to commonly assigned application Serial No. (97-1232), entitled “Vehicle Accessory Control with Integrated Voice and Manual Activation”, filed concurrently herewith.
The present invention relates in general to a voice controlled mobile office, and more specifically to a user interface for a mobile office employing both speech recognition and reconfigurable, steering wheel-mounted control switches.
The use of electronic data processing for business and personal tasks such as e-mail, electronic calendaring, network information exchange, and web browsing is becoming widespread. Continuous accessibility to these functions is often desired, especially for business users. Thus, a need exists to make these functions available in mobile vehicles. To help insure that a mobile office can be used without interfering with the task of driving a vehicle, a simple and efficient driver-machine interface (DMI) is desired. For example, a desire to maintain the driver's hands on the steering wheel and eyes on the road has led to an interest in voice recognition technologies. Systems using voice recognition can initiate control actions based on spoken commands being recognized using advanced computation techniques.
Voice activation systems require the user to learn a predetermined grammar (i.e., a set of spoken commands) which can be recognized by the system. As the number of controlled systems and the corresponding functions controlled by speech command increases, the user is required to learn an ever larger grammar. To simplify the voice recognition task and minimize the required grammar, it has been suggested to provide manual control switches on a steering wheel which may be reconfigured using voice commands. However, system cost and complexity are still driven up as more features and components are added to the voice actuation system itself. Furthermore, control operations can still remain complex and difficult to use and remember without an appropriate interface.